打印

作者

来源

URBAN GEOGRAPHY,Vol.41,Issue10,P.1284-1293

语言

英文

关键字

Density,extended urbanization,urban political ecology,urban political pathology

作者单位

Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Toronto, Canada

摘要

The paper’s main concern are the intersections of the urban fabric and process with their political ecologies and political pathologies. Density is the substrate of core debates we are having in geography, urban studies and urban practice. These debates have oscillated between the states of hope and panic about the role of density in our urban futures and they have been sharpened by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The paper argues for a contextual and relational notion of density and points to a core dilemma of the concept of density: there is always either too much or too little of it.KEYWORDS: Densityextended urbanizationurban political ecologyurban political pathology“For sociological purposes a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals” (Wirth, 1938: 8; quoted in Roskamm, 2011, p. 41)“Look at Burning Man! They grow to 70,000 people in one week.” (Paul Romer; in Badger, 2019).“The virus never before entered a community like West Point, in Monrovia, Liberia … more than 70,000 people crowded together on a peninsula, with no running water, sanitation or garbage collection.” (WHO, no date)I speak here from previous and ongoing projects where density plays a dominant role. My main concerns are the intersections of the urban fabric and process with their political ecologies and political pathologies (Connolly, Keil, Ali, 2020, Tzaninis, Mandler, Kaika, Keil, 2020). Density is the substrate of core debates we are having in geography, urban studies and urban practice (McFarlane, 2016, 2020). These debates have oscillated between the states of hope and panic about the role of density in our urban futures. The presentation on which this paper is based was given months before we knew of COVID-19 and the first draft of the paper was sent for review before the end of 2019. The oscillations between aspiration and panic related to urban densities have since become more erratic and intense (Biglieri, De Vidovich, Keil, 2020; Boterman, 2020; Moos et al., 2020). What seemed to be considered the positive – ecological and social – effects of what has become known as the Urban Revolution, have now somehow turned into a dystopian narrative of “eco-disaster” associated with our planetary urban densities (Vidal, 2018) and a potential problem in the age of contagion. This points to a core dilemma of the concept of density: there is always either too much or too little of it.This argument originally comes from some recent theoretical considerations developed around the particular history of Istanbul with its perplexing imbrications “de/redensifications” (McFarlane, 2020) of centralities and peripheralities (Güney, Üçoğlu & Keil, 2019, Üçoğlu, Güney & Keil, 2020). Based on German theorist Nikolai Roskamm’s comprehensive study on the concept of density, we start from the assumption that “when we think about what makes a city a city or what makes society a society, … when we negotiate urban design projects and their social and ecological effects and not least when we discuss planning objectives and guidelines, there is always talk of ‘density’” (Roskamm, 2011, p. 9). In order to address the often “chaotic” quality of the concept, it helps to distinguish, as Roskamm does, between the “’built density’ of urban design (Städtebau) or the ‘social density’ of sociology” (Roskamm, 2011, p. 10). The meaning of density in either application is established by user practice, without which the significance of the term cannot be determined. User practice can be measured along both qualitative and quantitative registers. The quantitative measurement – population distribution across a given territory – is a fictitious value; the qualitative measurement leads to a highly contentious notion of density in which “density” obtains a subjective quality such as in the sentence: the density in suburbs is too low (ibid. 10–11).The use of the term density in the social sciences is characterized by a fundamental contradiction that has been visible from the beginning of what we might call “urban studies”. This contradiction pits a general acceptance of density as a building block of modern society against a fear of density as a potential cause of societal problems (decay, hygiene, social unrest). That there cannot be urbanity without density has since been a staple in urban thinking, especially in recent debates on urbanism, reurbanization, the compact city, etc. In addition to density as a marker of modern urbanity and solidarity (Durkheim), Wirth (1938) adds the normative notion of increased tolerance to the work density supposedly does in cities (Roskamm, 2011, p. 41). In addition, for modern(ist) urbanists, density could be imagined positively in a building or in ensembles of buildings while traditional densities of (for example, medieval) cities were considered unsavory.After the modern(ist)s, density was brought back into the center of the city both normatively and through pervasive reurbanization, a process that started with the celebration of dense street life in Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life (Jacobs, 1961). Still, authors like Tom Sieverts remind us that the role of density in creating a more condensed urban form and protection of the countryside “is based on a whole series of untested assumptions” and that any notion of compactness on its own was an undue simplification of the sprawling regional realities in which cities now have to be imagined (Sieverts, 2003). Seeing residential density at this wider – regional or global – scale, leads to different conclusions about its material, visual and social aspects. Lastly, these conversations also lead to thinking about the relationship of centrality and density which are often confused. But, as Josh Akers (2017) has shown, centrality and density are distinct and in a problematic relationship, especially through processes of redlining, racialization, housing covenants and violence.Density has to be understood in relation to the interest-laden politics of densification, the real morphology of settlements and the actual context of the sub/urban landscape found in centers and peripheries alike (Charmes and Keil, 2015; also see Keil, 2015). The postsuburban landscape, or in other words the “continuous city” (Lerup, 2017), is one of mixed densities of both built form and social relations rather than a monoculture of low-density residential subdivisions. Additionally, the postsuburban hypothesis may contain an ontology defying the common narrative that sees the solution to the joint problems of climate change and social injustice in higher densities in our urban fabric (Keil, 2018).In what follows, I will argue that the density debate provides a crucial link between two vital domains we associate with urban life today: sub/urban political ecologies and sub/urban political pathologies. This entails on one level that definition and context are crucial when density impacts are at stake and that complex socio-spatial relationships define and refract the meaning of density in social and spatial terms. This argument was fully in place theoretically before unprecedented forest fires devastated Australia and California and before COVID-19 spread around the globe. In many ways, what was hypothetical when I first asked the questions I wanted to answer in this essay, has now become more broadly experiential. Although we are still far from understanding the relationships of density, climate change and pandemic disease to any conclusive and satisfactory degree, we have more certainty now at both an intuitive level and through emerging research.Political ecologies: sustainable densitiesIn the field of urban political ecology, I am influenced by scholars who have defied methodologically “cityist” understandings of sustainability politics and who have begun to ask “why everybody thinks cities will save the planet” (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2020; Rosol et al., 2017). Instead, a more systemic understanding of the political ecologies of extended urbanization may be more appropriate and move the debate beyond the territorial or corporate notion of the city (but see also Kirby’s (2019) reminder that the local state remains important in matters of urban sustainability). We must accept that the multiple densities of extended urbanization deserve consideration around the urban future (Tzaninis et al., 2020). This connects further to a reevaluation of social and economic changes in cities from a more relational perspective (Lawton, 2020b; Van Kempen & Wissink, 2014).The confusion in the use of the concept of density is, of course, also at work in proposing density as a solution to challenges at the scale of the housing crisis or the climate emergency. In the context of urban political ecologies, density operates as a political trope in urbanist debates on sustainability and climate change adaptation. In urban political struggles, it often defines a typical line of contention as it serves as a medium to create “chains of equivalences” to other urban discourses and struggles, as Rosol (2013, p. 2241) has shown for the “EcoDensity” debates in Vancouver. Canada is in many ways ground zero of these debates, most visibly expressed in the urbanist strategy of Vancouverism that lives by the motto “density is your friend” (Beasley, 2019). Vertical sprawl is a particular issue that needs discussion in this context (Graham, 2018; Hwang, 2006; Peck et al., 2014). I live in another Canadian city, Toronto, where common urbanist mantra has been strongly aligned with the notion of density. To outsiders, this may be a bizarre circumstance. After all, Toronto looks very much like a large suburb with clusters of high rises protruding from its landscape. Old notions of Toronto as Vienna (Austria) surrounded by Phoenix (Arizona) may now be replaced by the idea that the city is more like Los Angeles surrounded by Shanghai. The debate seems to have been locked in a dichotomous framework where the virtuous density of the center is played against the villainous sprawl of the periphery. At the same time, inner urban low density neighborhoods (“the yellow belt”) are losing people while high rise towers sprout everywhere in the middle of a housing crisis (Dingman, 2018). The tension here is often resolved in an appeal for the “missing middle” of medium densities that are at once to address sustainability and housing affordability concerns (Lorinc et al., 2019).In common normative missives of current urbanism, as Lawton reminds us,“the representation of a higher-density urban centre comes to be perceived as the future of urban living” (Lawton, 2020a, p. 190). In this context, the notion of a dense urban “landscape” is weaponized to accomplish more than just changes to urban form through “architecture or design as ‘landscape’, and landscape as a symbolic marker that incorporates a wide array of everyday elements, from the design detail of private housing, and the provision of public goods such as tree coverage, to everyday infrastructures such as footpaths” (Lawton, 2020a, p. 202). Lawton also wonders what would happen if the producers of such landscapes, the celebrated architects of inner city dense urbanity, “toured the sites of recent public housing developments” (Lawton, 2020a, p. 204) instead of promulgating luxury housing. In Toronto and other cities with a legacy of suburban highrise neighborhoods from Fordist/socialist times, “tower renewal” programs are being run more or less successfully. But the emphasis remains on densifying the inner city with shiny new celebrity-architect-built skyscrapers and bulging megablocks of mixed-use, often in combination with some form of ecological modernization or smart urbanization1. The poverty of the flatlands north, east and west of the wealthy and (mostly) white downtown core will not go away. There is no automatic trickle-down effect of urbanity (a questionable urbanity to boot) from the dense center to the (also) dense periphery. Quite the opposite is true. Where spectacular projects are planned and built, most often the rich get richer and the poor get poorer while both live in denser environments. As for the specific sustainability question, which has now reached a global scale and historic immediacy in the climate emergency, figuring out at what densities we can, could and should live is central to concerted action. Falling back into stereotypes of good and bad densities, linked exclusively to built form, is not helpful here. Purely quantitative, technical and physical understandings of settlement and production patterns are insufficient. Grasping the variable effects of infrastructures of sub/urban life and the politics of sub/urban governance is, however, crucial (Alexander & Gleeson, 2018; Maginn and Keil, 2019). We can then develop meaningful, nuanced material worlds where questions of density, for example, are aligned with demands for racial justice in property relations, accessible public space and more sustainable urban metabolisms for all urban residents.Political pathologies: geographies of infectious diseaseIn the area of urban political pathology (Keil and Ali, 2011), urban density has been mobilized in the explanation of the historical spread of infectious disease. Urbanism as built and social density was considered beneficial to overall public health during the 20th century if other hygienic measures (such as safe water and sewage systems, access to parks, etc.) were in place. High urban densities do create perfect conditions for the spread of disease but cities also perform as laboratories for the defeat of disease (as hygiene and public health measures prevail). Jane Jacobs made this a plank in her urbanist platform: “Cities were once the most helpless and devastated victims of disease, but they became great disease conquerors” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 447). Moreover, the distinction between high density and overcrowding is crucial as both tend to come with different articulations of class, race and related social markers relevant in an unequal urban landscape.The density-disease connection has been made, unsurprisingly, from day one of the current COVID-19 pandemic, under the impression of which I am revising this paper. In the conventional way of looking at cities and disease, as Wolf (2016, p. 962) reminds us, “[o]vercrowding and high population density, international connectivity and the close proximity of different species” are often named as major reasons for cities’ vulnerability to infectious disease outbreaks. In the SARS outbreak in 2003 in Hong Kong, Singapore and Toronto, densities played a role in disease transmission, especially in the Hong Kong case of Amoy Gardens in Kowloon where the virus spread through the neighborhood’s tall residential towers like wildfire (Ali and Keil, 2008). While it appeared obvious, for example, that the highrise form of housing in Hong Kong contributed to the transmission of the virus, the sprawling suburban form of Toronto played its part as well as many infections occurred in the low density suburbs where many of Toronto’s diaspora communities live and are served in the medical system. What this particular intersection of density and urbanization highlights, is the question of scale and networks (see also Wolf, 2016, on this question). Overall, it was more important, then, that most cities that were affected by the spread of SARS were connected in dense networks of interactivity (rather than built density) both economic (global cities) and demographic (diaspora cities).Even before the current COVID-19 pandemic, we began to question the underlying assumptions regarding density and disease and have directed attention toward a more nuanced but also more comprehensive understanding of the relationships of sub/urbanization and the spread of infectious disease (Connolly, Keil, Ali, 2020). There are no linear density-disease relationships here but complex and contradictory ones. Certainly during the outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa in 2014/5 the general factors of urbanization, poverty, unsanitary physical conditions played a role, especially in the large informal settlements of Freetown and Monrovia – in that city’s West Point community, where more than 70,000 people live on a narrow and environmentally precarious spit of sand by the ocean, the virus was widespread and the area was subject to violent confrontations and ultimately a quarantine by the government. But absolute density may only be part of the story as the density of human relationships in affected areas also led to innovative community-based responses to the outbreak (Ali et al., forthcoming; Hoffman, 2016).The density issue was front and center in the COVID-19 crisis from the start. Western observers watched in awe how the hyperdense megalopolis of Wuhan, the assumed geographic origin of the outbreak, was hit hard and became subject to lockdown early in 2020. When subsequently Milan, Madrid, and New York City became the centers of the pandemic in the spring, some blamed the high densities of such urban centers for their vulnerability to the virus while others came to the defense of urbanism as a form of life that is invariably characterized by dense landscapes of human settlement (Florida, 2020). It turned out that COVID-19 was really a disease of the social, spatial and institutional peripheries of cities as some argued (Biglieri, De Vidovich and Keil, 2020). While the rich cities of the global North began to show signs of distress, much attention was diverted to the informal settlements of the Global South once more as many feared that the squatter neighborhoods of India or Africa may be particularly prone to attack by SARS-CoV-2 as social distancing and basic hygiene measures might be impossible to achieve under the circumstances of life in those places. But, as it had been the experience during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, existing social organization and emerging community initiative may have been decisive forces in building defenses against the virus despite the obvious challenges presented by overcrowding and poverty, leading one observer to conclude that the world “could be learning from the experiences that Africans and their governments have had with pandemics and viral diseases” (Attiah, 2020).Ten months into the pandemic, in many cities, the relationships of densities and the virulence of COVID-19 have become part of urbanist and planning debates and pragmatic questions around how to (re)build cities in the face of the inequities that were revealed in the path of the virus. One comprehensive report concluded in October 2020 that the health emergency “amplified” two density-related urban problems rather than producing them: “First, higher density urban environments function best if they are connected with appropriate open space, which includes things like courtyards, balconies, rooftop gardens, as well as surrounding public green spaces such as parks. Second, higher density built form is prone to overcrowding when housing affordability is an issue” (Moos et al., 2020, p. 11). A more complete picture awaits further empirical and conceptual study. For now, there is no one relationship between density and disease that stands out universally. One study of COVID-19 in urban and rural regions of the Netherlands hypothesized that “is evident that the factors explaining different levels of incidence, hospitalisation and mortality are more complex than outright population density” (Boterman, 2020, p. 8); another study of Chinese and Italian cities finds that “spatial context, especially crowding, are important factors for assessing the shape of epidemic curves” (Rader et al., 2020). While the empirical analyses of COVID-densities are not yet fully available, we do know how they relate to the political and action agendas linked to urbanism. Here Toronto urban placemaker Jay Pitter (2020; emphasis in the original) has distinguished “dominant density, designed by and for predominately white, middle-class urban dwellers living in high-priced condominiums within or adjacent to the city’s downtown core” and “forgotten densities. This form of density expands the dominant density discourse (and its myopic, privileged framework) and includes favelas, shanty towns, factory dormitories, seniors’ homes, tent cities, Indigenous reserves, prisons, mobile home parks, shelters and public housing.” As the world “reopens” in and after the pandemic, being sensitive to those quite different densities will be unavoidable in providing the map for the way we proceed.ConclusionDensities, then, are contextual. Deploying density in urban and planning practice comes with more or less hegemonic epistemologies and alternate agendas (Pérez, 2020; Rosol, 2013). In the planet’s sub/urban expanse, we have the recent efforts by state- or market-led housing agencies to build massive, hyper-dense new highrise developments at the urban periphery of cities such as Istanbul, Shanghai, Delhi, or Cairo often linked to “slum clearance” using a discursive frame that holds the “bad” density of traditional urban settlement from where people are displaced (informal, squatted, unsanitary, seismically unsafe, politically suspicious, etc.) against the “good” density of the new developments outside of the traditional urban core (Üçoğlu, Güney, Keil, 2020; Güney, Keil, Üçoğlu, 2019 on this topic see also McFarlane, 2016, 2020). Confusingly, on the other hand, we have seen a revival of thinking that likens cities and urbanity to those kinds of conditions that the moderns sought to eradicate. Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Romer’s, visit to the annual Burning Man festival in 2019 in the Nevada desert – “an experiment in community and art” – evoked conjurations of anarchist-neoliberal self-organization in (temporary) densities of creativity and innovation. Before visiting Burning Man himself, Romer apparently had long been using the festival’s pop-up urbanity of 70,000 during each year’s Labor Day weekend as a (shock value) metaphor for urbanization in the 21st century. Emily Badger (2019), who accompanied Romer on two of his eventual trips to the site observed: “By 2050, developing-world cities are projected to gain 2.3 billion people. Many of those people will move to makeshift settlements on the edge of existing cities, tripling the urbanized land area in the developing world.” Romer looks to Burning Man for inspiration to do things right: “We’re likely to decide in this time frame what people are going to live with forever.” Given the size of the task, this is a powerful projection. Badger speculates what Romer might take from this: “What they do here is a model for any place with few resources but just enough volunteers to survey new neighborhoods on the urban periphery. But on a grander scale, if he ever persuades someone to build a new city, maybe the people to call are at Burning Man.”Even more pronounced in terms of models of urbanity that rule the current quest for urban futures is a related tendency to look at refugee camps as a model for where large masses of people might live in densities and under conditions that had previously been denounced as unhealthy and dangerous: that Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh could be seen as accidental cities speak to this tendency. A newspaper report about one such camp claims that “on the fringes of many of the camp roads today, the grim black and white of [Bangladesh’s refugee] law has given way to the exuberant colour of lively bazaars, where shoppers can buy everything from Bluetooth speakers to live chickens.” The reporter cites an emergency coordinator on site: Planners need to “start thinking it’s like a city” (VanderKlippe, 2019). On a more serious register, the pandemic has led Bhan et al. (2020) to surmise that density can, indeed, be an urban resource, “not necessarily in the form of tightly packed residential and commercial operations, but in the interchange and circulation of bodies, materials, and sensibilities.” And they pose the question: “What would this reading of collective life, of density as sociality, say about the lockdown?” Any pandemic response would clearly need to find at least part of the answer in “a relevant scale of isolation and a notion of ‘distancing’ that retained the existing arrangements of the urban majority” that would differ from the normative conversations that characterize western urbanism to date.If planners do take this admonition seriously, they need to be aware of the context. The important thread that holds these various approaches above to the topic of density together is the insight that density is not a simple proportion or relation (such as population to territory) but a complex set of socio-spatial relationships in which topology and scale matter as well as socio-spatial markers, most prominently the distribution of class, race and gender and relations of colonial dependency. Clearly, the temporary densities of the Rohingya camps are of a different nature than those of the weeklong gathering at Burning Man. What we have seen is that if we want to resolve the density dilemma – that there is either too much or too little of it – we need to recognize the context-specific use and meaning of the concept. In the massive new peripheral landscapes that make ours a suburban planet, density is instrumentalized for the building of comprehensive new societies. We may have to be more concerned about the conceptual weight of density in public – urbanist – discourse than in any quantitative measure builders are using to uphold density codes in the built city. In terms of urban political ecologies, we are discovering that dense and compact cities may not be the only imaginary of an urbanized world in the age of the climate emergency. And in the area of urban political pathologies, we realize that overlapping spatialized interrelationships rather than urban densities in place may be important factors in disease transmission. The cascading crises of the current period have reinforced the argument put forth in this short essay that how we grapple with the notion of density conceptually and practically (as urbanists) has consequences in equal measure with matters of political ecology and political pathology. In either case, we should be warned not to make facile, linear connections between density of our settlement and the biophysical threats and risks we face in climate change and disease. How exactly we write density into our theoretical, conceptual, methodological and empirical projects, then, will matter for whether and how the density dilemma can be resolved and we can build a more sustainable, healthy and just city.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. I am thinking here, for example, of Bjarke Ingels’ KING Toronto project (https://www.designboom.com/architecture/bjarke-ingels-group-king-toronto-penthouses-10-19-2019/) or Google Sidewalk Labs’ now defunct smart city designs for the Toronto Waterfront (https://www.sidewalklabs.com/). For related takes on this issue see https://suburbs.info.yorku.ca/2012/10/fixing-the-towers-in-the-plains-or-building-castles-in-the-sky/) and (https://www.some-thoughts.org/keil.html).ReferencesAkers, Joshua. (2017). A new urban medicine show: Blight remediation as contemporary cure-all. In B Doucet (Ed.), Why detroit matters: decline, renewal, and hope in a divided city, pp. 95–116. Policy Press. [Google Scholar]Alexander, Sam, & Gleeson, Brendan. (2018). Degrowth in the suburbs: A radical urban imaginary. Palgrave Macmillan. [Google Scholar]Ali, S. Harris & Roger Keil, eds. (2008) Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City. Oxford: Wiley [Google Scholar]Ali, S. Harris, Mosoka Fallah, Joseph McCarthy, Roger Keil, Creighton Connolly. (forthcoming). Mobilizing the Urban Social Infrastructure of Informal Settlements in Infectious Disease Response – The Case of Ebola Virus Disease and COVID-19 in West Africa. Landscape and Urban Planning. [Google Scholar]Angelo, Hillary, & Wachsmuth, David. (2020). Why does everybody think cities can save the planet? Urban Studies, 57(11), 2201–2221. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098020919081 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]Kirby, A. (2019). Sustainability, adaptation and the local state: An overview. Journal of Sustainable Research, 2019(1), e190012. [Google Scholar]Attiah, Karen (2020, September 22). Africa has defied the covid-19 nightmare scenarios. We shouldn’t be surprised. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/22/africa-has-defied-covid-19-nightmare-scenarios-we-shouldnt-be-surprised/ [Google Scholar]Badger, Emily (2019, September 5). A nobel-winning economist goes to burning man. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/upshot/paul-romer-burning-man-nobel-economist.html [Google Scholar]Beasley, Larry. (2019). Vancouverism. UBC Press. [Google Scholar]Bhan, G., Caldeira, T., Gillespie, K., & Simone, A. (2020, August 3). The pandemic, southern urbanisms and collective life. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-pandemic-southern-urbanisms-and-collective-life [Google Scholar]Biglieri, Samantha Lorenzo De Vidovich & Roger Keil. (2020). City as the core of contagion? Repositioning COVID-19 at the social and spatial periphery of urban society, Cities & Health, doi:10.1080/23748834.2020.1788320 [Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]Boterman, Willem R. (2020, July). Urban-rural polarisation in times of the corona outbreak? The early demographic and geographic patterns of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in the Netherlands. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 111(3), 513–529. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12437 [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]Charmes, Eric and Roger Keil, 2015. The Politics of Post-Suburban Densification in Canada and France, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39, 3; doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12194 [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Connolly, Creighton, Roger Keil, S. Harris Ali. (2020). Extended urbanisation and the spatialities of infectious disease: Demographic change, infrastructure and governance. Urban Studies. doi:10.1177/0042098020910873D [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Dingman, Shane. (2018, March 15). Toronto’s low-rise neighbourhoods losing density as ‘overhousing’ spreads. The Globe and Mail. [Google Scholar]Florida, Richard. (2020, April 3). The geography of coronavirus. CityLab. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-03/what-we-know-about-density-and-covid-19-s-spread [Google Scholar]Graham, Stephen. (2018). Vertical: The city from satellites to bunkers. Verso. [Google Scholar]Güney K Murat, Roger Keil and Murat Üçoğlu eds. (2019). Massive Suburbanization: (Re)Building the Global Periphery. Toronto: University of Toronto Press [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Hoffman, Danny. (2016). A crouching village: Ebola and the empty gestures of quarantine in monrovia. City & Society, 28(2), 246–264. https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12083 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]Hwang, I.S.Y. (2006). When does stacking become vertical sprawl? In U. Mander, C.A. Brebbia, & Enzo Tiezzi (Eds.), The sustainable city IV: Urban regeneration and sustainability, 283-292. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Jacobs, Jane. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. Randomhouse. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Keil, Roger. (2015). Towers in the park. Bungalows In The Garden: Peripheral Densities, Metropolitan Scales and The Political Cultures Of Post-suburbia, Built Environment, 41(4), 579-596. doi:10.2148/benv.41.4.579 [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Keil, Roger 2018. Suburban planet. Cambridge: Polity. [Google Scholar]Keil, Roger and S. Harris Ali. (2011). “The urban political pathology of emerging infectious disease in the age of the global city” In Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward (eds.) Urban/Global: Relationality & Territoriality In the Production of Cities. [Google Scholar]Lawton, Philip. (2020a). Design, Density and importance of ‘Landscape’. Building Material, 22, 189–206. doi:10.2307/26816298 [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Lawton.(2020b). Unbounding gentrification theory: multidimensional space, networks and relational approaches. Regional Studies, 54(2), 268-279. doi:10.1080/00343404.2019.1646902 [Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]Lerup, Lars. (2017). The continuous city: Fourteen essays on architecture and urbanization. Rice Architecture. [Google Scholar]Lorinc, John, Bozikovic, Alex, Case, Cheryll, & Vaughan, Annabel (eds). (2019). House divided how the missing middle will solve Toronto’s affordability crisis. Coach House Books. [Google Scholar]Maginn, Paul and Roger Keil. (2019). The suburbs can help the city in the fight against climate change, The Conversation, December 9; https://theconversation.com/the-suburbs-can-help-cities-in-the-fight-against-climate-change-127663 [Google Scholar]McFarlane, Colin. (2016). The geographies of urban density: Topology, politics and the city. Progress in Human Geography, 40(5), 5. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515608694 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]McFarlane, Colin. (2020). De/re-densification. City, 24(1–2), 314–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1739911 [Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]Moos, Markus, McCulley, Amanda, & Vinodrai, Tara. (2020). COVID-19 and urban density: Evaluating the arguments, discussion report. University of Waterloo. https://uwaterloo.ca/environment/sites/ca.environment/files/uploads/files/densityhousing_1_arguments_moosmcculleyvinodrai.pdf [Google Scholar]Peck, Jamie, Siemiatycki, Elliot, & Wyly, Elvin. (2014). Vancouver’s suburban involution. City, 18(4–5), 386–415. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2014.939464 [Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]Pérez, Federico. (2020). ‘The miracle of density’: The socio‐material epistemics of urban densification. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44(4), 617–635. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12874 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]Pitter, Jay. (2020, April 17). Urban density: Confronting the distance between desire and disparity. Azure Magazine. https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/urban-density-confronting-the-distance-between-desire-and-disparity/ [Google Scholar]Rader, B., Scarpino, S.V., Nande, A. (2020). Crowding and the shape of COVID-19 epidemics. Nature Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-1104-0 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]Roskamm, Nikolai. (2011). Dichte: Eine transdisziplinäre Dekonstruktion. transcript Verlag. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Rosol, Marit. (2013). Vancouver’s “ecodensity” planning initiative: A struggle over hegemony? Urban Studies, 50(11), 2238–2255. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013478233 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]Rosol, Marit, Béal, Vincent, & Mössner, Samuel. (2017). Greenest cities? The (post-)politics of new urban environmental regimes. Environment & Planning A, 49(8), 1710–1718. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17714843 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]Sieverts, Tom. (2003). Cities without cities: An interpretation of the Zwischenstadt. Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203380581 [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Tzaninis Yannis, Mandler Tait, Kaika Maria, Keil Roger. (2020). Moving urban political ecology beyond the ‘urbanization of nature.’ Progress in Human Geography. doi:10.1177/0309132520903 [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Üçoğlu, Murat, K. Murat Güney, Roger Keil. (2020). Form, Function, Density: Understanding the Legacies of a Century of Modernist Planning and Urbanisation in Istanbul, In: Rubin, Harrison, Alison Todes, Alexandra Appelbaum eds. Densifying the City: Global Cases and Johannesburg. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 73–82. [Google Scholar]Van Kempen, R., & Wissink, B. (2014). Between places and flows: Towards a new agenda for neighbourhood research in an age of mobility. Journal Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 96(2), 95–108. https://doi.org/10.1111/geob.12039 [Google Scholar]VanderKlippe, Nathan. (2019, May 11). The accidental city. The Globe and Mail. A1, A10–13. [Google Scholar]Vidal, John. (2018, March 19). The 100 million city: Is 21st century urbanisation out of control? The Guardian Cities. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/19/urban-explosion-kinshasa-el-alto-growth-mexico-city-bangalore-lagos [Google Scholar]Wirth, Louis. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. The American Journal of Sociology, 44(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1086/217913 [Crossref], [Google Scholar]Wolf, Meike. (2016). Rethinking urban epidemiology: Natures, networks and materialities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(5), 958–982. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12381 [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]World Health Organization. (n.d.). A fast-moving Ebola epidemic full of tragic surprises. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/ebola-6-months/surprises/en/ [Google Scholar]